Close approach of the Moon and Uranus

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Appulses feed

Tags: Appulse

The Moon and Uranus will make a close approach, passing within 1°12' of each other. From some parts of the world, the Moon will pass in front of Uranus, creating a lunar occultation. The Moon will be 15 days old.

From Cambridge , the pair will be visible between 22:49 and 02:37. They will become accessible at around 22:49, when they rise to an altitude of 20° above your south-eastern horizon. They will reach their highest point in the sky at 00:43, 26° above your southern horizon. They will become inaccessible at around 02:37 when they sink below 20° above your south-western horizon.

The Moon will be at mag -12.7; and Uranus will be at mag 5.5. Both objects will lie in the constellation Scorpius.

They will be too widely separated to fit within the field of view of a telescope, but will be visible through a pair of binoculars.

A graph of the angular separation between the Moon and Uranus around the time of closest approach is available here.

The positions of the pair at the moment of closest approach will be as follows:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
The Moon 16h21m40s 22°39'S Scorpius -12.7 32'26"2
Uranus 16h22m10s 21°26'S Scorpius 5.5 3"9

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 178° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 3 Jul 2024

The sky on 3 July 2024
Sunrise
05:09
Sunset
20:24
Twilight ends
22:37
Twilight begins
02:56


Waning Crescent

3%

27 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:44 14:12 21:39
Venus 05:47 13:21 20:56
Moon 02:34 10:37 18:50
Mars 01:52 08:57 16:02
Jupiter 02:57 10:23 17:48
Saturn 23:39 05:19 11:00
All times shown in EDT.

Source

The circumstances of this event were computed using the DE430 planetary ephemeris published by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).

This event was automatically generated by searching the ephemeris for planetary alignments which are of interest to amateur astronomers, and the text above was generated based on an estimate of your location.

Related news

14 Mar 2067  –  Uranus enters retrograde motion
29 May 2067  –  Uranus at opposition
14 Aug 2067  –  Uranus ends retrograde motion
18 Mar 2068  –  Uranus enters retrograde motion

Image credit

The Moon in conjunction with Venus and Jupiter, with the Very Large Telescope in the foreground. Image © Y. Beletsky, ESO, 2009.

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